One Sweet Kiss
by HushHushListen
Summary: Lies. Scandal. Sex. Death. And, above all, a kiss. Enter the life of the Night Mother herself—from her murderous childhood habits to her affair with Sithis to the fiery grave that condemned her forever.


**a/n: Should I continue this? Input would be appreciated!**

_PROLOGUE_

No one ever knew where she came from. One day she just "showed up".

Grandma Turpin discovered her on the stoop of her porch one snowy morning in winter—more specifically, Evening Star. The little white flakes had come down quite ferociously the night before, but by the time dawn yawned its colors into the sky, a light, steady stream of the wintry crystal poured down. Beneath a thin, moth-eaten blanket lay a child of white skin and tufts of hair dark as night.

Though everyone knew Grandma Turpin to be the most experienced healer in all of Cyrodill, they looked at the newborn babe with pity and even some revulsion. "Why, she's been left out all night—and in winter, no less!" they cried when they saw her, straining to shout over the cries. "Why would you waste your time on a newborn babe already dead?" But Grandma Turpin wouldn't hear any of it. With thin, pursed lips, she spoke of her utmost determination. Even her best friends could not sway her. And so, while the others stood beside and whispered behind her back, she tended to the young child, who was so flushed from fever that it almost looked like sunburn.

One night, beside the fire, while Grandma Turpin rocked in her chair and fed the child a liquid mixture made of herbs, the child's softly thudded to a halt.

Grandma Turpin's own heart froze, a steely ice covering her system. With a cry of terror, she fled from her chair and retrieved her family's most prized heirloom: a book of home remedies for almost every known disease. She knew all the entries except one. This one she dared not use, as she respected the ways of life and death, but she could not give up the only child she ever had.

With tears in her eyes, she grabbed a knife from her slew of supplies and, trembling, shuffled with hesitance toward the back room of her house. It was there that she kept all her patients—but she only needed one.

He slept in the far corner, weakened by fever and famine, cursed by the hour of death that was soon to fall upon him. He was old, this Dunmer. No one would blame her if his time came abruptly.

With a hysteric ferocity, she held up her knife with two hands above her head; the image painted a talon-like shadow on the wall. _One movement and it shall be done_, she thought, over and over, drilling the words into her brain as her hands began to shake. _It shall be done. It shall be done. Just one movement._

She screamed when he did not.

Now her fingers took over, swift and trained as any nurse, as she filled a vial with his blood, numb to what had transpired. She set it aside and began working on the one task that made her cringe with fear: cutting out his heart and skull. Blood bubbled and oozed down his skin and the bed sheets as she sawed with a sloppy precision, cutting through tendons and muscle with painful snaps. When the moment came where her lungs filled with panic and she was ready to cry out in terror, it was all over.

From there she rushed into the room; when she saw the lifeless babe, her strength returned, and she drizzled the blood into a circle on the floorboards with trembling urgency. The opened-eyed head of the Dunmer glared at her as she placed it at the top of the circle, and the heart in the center. Finally, she picked up her babe—carefully, gingerly, as if the sudden jostling would wake it—and placed it under the torn heart. From her pocket she pulled out a small bushel of Nightshade and sprinkled it over her child.

She spoke the words between cracked lips, her voice breaking and trembling as she did so. "Sweet Arkay, Sweet Arkay, relinquish your child unto me, for the blood of a sacrifice has been made in thy honor." The chant droned over and over, without hesitance, without emotion, till the embers of the fire gave way to shadows that ate Grandma Turpin's wrinkled face. Still, she continued, her voice reduced to a whisper by the time the coals died and the kiss of winter overtook her shack.

And as the prayer sent out, the wish was granted, and the babe's heart beat once more.


End file.
